Promises to Keep, Chapter 3
"Midnight snacks"
(no, there won't be new chapters every couple days after I get back to work. ^^;; Just took advantage of vacation time...)
Touya knew how to be patient, whether or not anyone else believed it of him. He waited for the bath sounds to be quieted, and light footsteps in the hall, and Sakura's door twice; he even waited for Yue to come downstairs again, and only then did he take the opportunity to make a further nuisance of himself.
Yue was sitting on the sofa with his wings hunched defensively forward, sheltering himself from Touya's eyes, even though Touya had already had his evening's laugh; Touya grinned to himself and ruffled his fingertips through Yue's feathers.
The moon-angel was still sulking; he shifted his wing away from Touya's fingers, and kept silently working a tangled plastic clip out of his hair.
"Transform," Touya suggested. "Yuki's hair is short; they'll fall out."
"Our clothing shifts with us," Yue said. "When you put them in my hair, they become something I am wearing. And I am not 'sleeping' with these in my hair."
Touya couldn't help laughing at the injured dignity in his voice, and reached past his wings to begin gently separating out the plastic clips. "Let me," he said. "You can't see what you're doing; you don't want to get the springs caught in your hair."
"...And since this is your fault to begin with..."
One thing that Yue and Yukito had in common was the tendency to remember things long past the point where most people would have let them go. All in all, though, Touya somewhat preferred dealing with Yue's version of it; Yukito always smiled and forgave him -- and saved up the karma he felt Touya deserved, and sprang the payback on him with elaborate teases at unexpected moments and in profoundly embarrassing ways. Yukito's blithe sense of humor was a double-edged sword; Touya was often glad Yue hadn't mastered the art of teasing, because he suspected he wouldn't have had a chance of surviving them both.
Touya had also learned how to take advantage of some parts of his lover's inhumanity -- Yue couldn't continue to stay vexed for very long with someone who was preening his feathers and smoothing his hair. Yukito was also rather susceptible to cuddling, but Yukito was more creative in his retorts.
And Touya never minded the opportunity to run his hands through Yue's wings, or his hair. He never admitted it aloud to either of them, but sometimes he teased Yue simply to ruffle his feathers, to have the excuse to smooth them soft and settled again.
...Something was playing a muffled but unbelievably cute little jingle. Touya looked over the side of the sofa; it was coming from inside Sakura's purse.
Yue tilted his head against the curve of Touya's hand when he looked up with the silent question in his eyes; Touya grinned at the success of his stratagem so far, and continued gently untangling the hairclips. "Cell phone," he said, in answer to that silent question. "They can leave a message; let's let her sleep." And let's take advantage of a little privacy too...
"Mmm..." Yue let his eyes drift half-shut, enjoying Touya's gentle attentiveness nearly as much as he'd been embarrassed by the teasing earlier.
Ten seconds after Sakura's cell phone stopped ringing, the Kinomoto house's phone started. Five rings later, Shaoran's panicked voice came on over the answering machine. "Touya? Dammit, Touya, Sakura's not answering her phone; where the hell are you? Is something going wrong? Should I get Kero to--"
Touya didn't have magical cards to summon a cordless handset from across the room. He did, however, have a soccer player's reflexes; he went straight over the back of the sofa, rolled, and came up with the handset in less than three seconds.
"For Pete's sake, brat, she's not answering because she's gone to sleep already! ...Yes, asleep. In her room. Without her phone. --Yes, I'm sure there's nothing sorcerous blocking off her room in some black hole dimension; I was just listening to the phone ring in her purse!"
Shaoran must have said something new-father-panicked and unwise about Touya's lack of ability to sense magical fields anymore, because Yue heard the plastic of the phone creak with the sudden increase of Touya's grip.
"Why, you snotfaced little punk--! I'm damn well capable of taking care of my own little sister for a week without interference from you or your--"
Yue closed his eyes tightly, made a desperate internal plea, plucked the phone out of Touya's hands, and turned over his consciousness to his other self.
"It's all right, both of you," Yukito's voice said cheerfully into the phone. "Shaoran-kun, Sakura-chan's fine. We can feel their hearts from here. They're both sleeping; please don't make us disturb her. Of course To-ya's been teasing us all, but he's done a perfectly fine job of taking care of her this evening, and he's even going to make her pancakes tomorrow morning. Without the black fishnet stockings on, as an extra special gesture..."
Still with his eyes closed tightly, Yue wished that he was physically capable of glaring at his other self, because he had to hold the phone away from his head as Shaoran loudly demanded what Touya was going to be wearing if he was so emphatically not wearing things. Almost in unison, Touya toppled over face-first into the sofa cushions, muttering something near-incoherent about "how the hell does he make not wearing fishnets sound even kinkier than wearing them?"
"...Yes, yes, but you see, he's not wearing the fishnets now, so it's all right..."
Touya could hear Shaoran's baffled outrage even several feet away from the phone: "But what was he doing with fishnets in the first place?"
Yue held the phone as far from himself as he could manage, huddled with his wings over his head defensively, even as Yukito said with blithe enthusiasm, "Well, you see, there was this adorable little black satin maid's outfit at a late-night rental store that..."
Touya snatched the phone from Yue desperately. "She'll talk to you tomorrow," he said, and hung up.
"...That I couldn't manage to talk him into wearing, of course," Yukito said to empty air, his voice brimming with mischief. "To-ya, you could have let me finish! ...Yes, Yue, I'm done now, thank you."
Yue buried his face in both hands, wings still huddled over his head. Touya sighed, and flopped back down next to Yue on the couch. "I don't know which of us he was playing with there..."
The phone started ringing again. Touya and Yue looked at it, and then at each other. Touya climbed back over the couch, fumbled around under the table which held the phone, and the phone went silent a moment before he reemerged brandishing the phone cable.
"There," he said, tossing the cable aside. "No more interruptions." He slid down the back of the sofa to settle beside Yue, and murmured into his ear, "So where were we...?"
"You were ridding my head of those," Yue reminded him flatly, pointing at the handful of pink plastic hairclips on the table as though they were a particularly foul infestation of contagious vermin.
"Oh... right."
Touya let the 'de-lousing' process linger on longer than was strictly necessary; some of the clips had gotten themselves intertangled with the long, silk-fine strands of Yue's hair, and it took care to work them free without pulling. Others he simply lingered over because he could, letting his breath warm Yue's throat, letting his fingertips brush gently through the roots of his hair. Once the braids' anchors were removed, it took more time to work the braids themselves out of his hair; Yue had fallen half asleep by the time he finished with that, and didn't resist when Touya lifted him into his lap, settled his wings over the arm of the sofa to keep them out of harm's way, and tilted Yue's head against his shoulder in order to keep stroking his hair.
"...you manipulative tease..."
Touya grinned and brushed a kiss against the crown of Yue's head. "I thought that was why you loved me."
"No," Yue murmured sleepily. "I love you because... even when you tease until someone wants to scream, I can always hear you saying 'I love you' with every moment of it. I can't begin to comprehend how you make the infliction of writhing misery into an expression of love, but it's enough to know that you do make it so. ...Thank you, by the way. The ridiculous hair clips did help to make my mistress feel less self-conscious about her own condition."
"Good," Touya said, with a smile.
A moment later, Yue lifted his head enough to glare up at him. "And don't ever do it again, since the point has already been made!"
Touya laughed himself light-headed, wheezing with the attempt to breathe deeply around his own hilarity and Yue's slight but solid weight against his chest. His vexation faintly visible through the calm, Yue shifted in Touya's arms so that he could arch a wing forward, hiding his face from his chortling lover like a swan settling its head beneath its wings to sleep.
With a soft sound of appreciation, Touya brushed his fingertips over the soft white feathers, and said, "You're so damn beautiful..." He cupped a hand to the taut curve of Yue's wing and tugged gently, the other hand rubbing his back just between the wings, where their weight sometimes made his back ache with tension.
After a moment, the rigidity of Yue's resistance softened, and he shifted his wing to arch about Touya as well, sheltering them both in their private snow-white world. Touya smiled and kissed him, softly, lingeringly, and Yue reached up to cup his hand against the curve of Touya's throat, admiring the warm and human strength of him. He arched his back awkwardly to shift himself closer, the other wing catching on the arm of the sofa; Touya chuckled.
"There's got to be someplace better to do this." Touya slipped one arm about Yue's waist and the other behind his knees, lifting him almost effortlessly, and looking around the house to try to think of better options. "Not next door to the monster; the basement's too full of bookshelves... too cold out on the balcony..."
In a voiceless but unarguable insistence, Yue tightened his arms around Touya's shoulders and kissed him again; it overrode Touya's lingering attempt at practicality. The dark-haired young man made an incoherent sound, shoving the coffee table aside with one foot and sinking to his knees, then lying down and bringing Yue on top of him so that he could stretch his wings. Sometimes, at the heights of their mutual passion, Yue forgot for a few moments that he wasn't flying; sometimes Touya forgot it too.
Yukito was more expressive and irrepressible, but in many ways he was also gentler. Once a person broke the shell of Yue's self-restraint, he was a fierce creature, proud and wild as a hawk, and almost silent in his passions, save for the rustle of his wings. Once in a while, on fairly rare occasions, Touya had heard him cry out in pleasure, but far more often their joining was as silent as wild creatures', and very unlike the way his laughing and expressive Yukito enjoyed their mutual loveplay.
Tonight with the monster here, Touya thought with the last shreds of his rationality, quiet would be good -- and then he lost even that thought in the sensation of Yue's hands tangled in his shirt, and Yue's lips and teeth tearing the buttons loose. His shirt ended up elbowed under the sofa somehow, and Yue's clothing got kicked toward the coffeetable, and Touya bit his lip hard when Yue's hands slipped into his jeans...
...and then his hands froze motionless; Touya took a sharp frustrated breath to demand why, and then he heard the footsteps on the stairs too.
Humming to herself softly, Sakura walked down the stairs and into the kitchen; over the mad panicked pounding of his own heart, Touya heard the clink of a bowl and dishware, a drawer opening, the freezer door -- and a giggle: "Chocolate chip mint! Oh, yum..."
Frozen motionless and afraid even his heartbeat was loud enough to give them away, Touya stared helplessly up at Yue, who looked as baffled and borderline-panicstricken as he himself felt. He debated clutching at their discarded clothing, but then she would hear them, and...
...a scoop of ice cream dropped into the bowl, and some syrup on top, and she rinsed the ice cream scoop so that it wouldn't get sticky, and then she set it in the dish drainer with a small clink, and Touya shut his eyes and silently prayed she'd stop cleaning up and take her ice cream back to her bedroom before he snapped and started laughing hysterically at the absurdity of it all.
Sakura's footsteps traced a path back toward the stairs... and then paused, and there was a rustle as she bent to pick something up...
...and with Touya's cast-off, buttons-torn-away shirt in her hands, she looked past the edge of the sofa at the tangle of the two of them.
After two frozen seconds, she dropped both the shirt and the bowl, her face flaming scarlet: "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry -- I -- oh goodness -- oh, and the ice cream too -- oh, no... I'm so sorry...!"
"I spilled some tea," Touya said desperately, even as he clawed at Yue's silks and flung a handful of fabric over them both so that it might not be quite so obvious that her brother was half naked and her moon guardian was wearing nothing but his hair and his very carefully poised wings. "Got it all over him. --Over us. Didn't want it to burn... um... so that's why... our... um... clothes..."
"Oh," Sakura said, blankly. "Oh, that's good. I mean... no, that's bad, I mean I hope you're all right, I mean... how much got spilled...? There aren't... er... broken pieces of... teacups, or something... are there...?"
"It's fine," Touya managed in a half strangled voice. "We're fine, the tea set's fine. Don't worry about us."
"That's good," Sakura said, utterly dazed. "I think. Isn't it? --Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you! I... um... need to clean up the ice cream... I should... --the mop's in the closet, right...?"
"No!" Touya yelped. "That is -- I'll be cleaning up the -- er -- tea, and -- I'll take care of it, you go rest... um... I'll bring you some more ice cream... just... uh... go upstairs...?"
"...Oh!" Still blushing bright crimson, Sakura nodded so vigorously Touya wondered why her head hadn't fallen off, and she took a couple faltering backwards steps toward the stairs, groping blind for the railing. "Right! I'll... um... go upstairs! --Fast! --Really fast! Um. Right--!"
She turned around and took the stairs as quickly as she could possibly manage in her condition, and a few seconds later her bedroom door shut loudly. Even from the living room, Touya and Yue both heard her miserable wail: "Sakura-chan no BAKA!"
Touya couldn't fight it off any longer; he burst into peals of near-hysterical laughter, clutching at the couch and methodically beating his head against the pillows.
"Oh my God...! God, that settles it, next time we pick a room with a DOOR and we stay there, we... oh, hell, that poor kid...!" He streaked his arm across his face to scrub away the laugh-tears, and gasped, "I'll get her some ice cream..."
"No, I will," Yue said, in a voice distorted almost to the verge of unrecognizability, thick with self-loathing.
The sound of it startled Touya out of his hysterics; he took a careful breath and fought back the last of the mad giggles, and reached over to touch his lover's shoulder lightly. "Yue...?"
Huddled in a pool of moonlight-hued silk and his hair, he whispered savagely, "This is my fault. Not hers."
"Of course it's not her fault," Touya said, "but don't go beating yourself up too badly; it was certainly taking two of us to tango back there."
"You tried to suggest... discretion. I was... not thinking clearly, I was a selfish stubborn fool who wished to thwart you a bit, for nothing but pettiness, and..." Yue shook his head slightly, sharply, and gathered the puddle of his discarded clothing close. "I'm sure she won't want to see my face. I couldn't blame her. Her sworn servant, her own guardian, too lost in his own lust even to notice her... Tell Yukito to take her some ice cream; I'm sure she won't want to see me."
"Yue--"
But Yue had already furled his wings around himself; when the flare of his power had faded, Yukito was sitting in the middle of the living room floor blinking in absolute bewilderment. "What just happened...? Yue's been completely blocking me, and he's not even speaking now."
"How long has he been blocking you?" Touya asked, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Yukito looked a little sheepish. "I heard the phone call, of course, but he was still irritated that I'd made him look in a mirror to show me his hair and then I'd laughed at him, so... he shut me out for playing with poor Shaoran-kun; what's happened since then?"
Touya opened his mouth to try to explain, closed it, thought hard, tried again, then thwacked the palm of his hand into his forehead with a groan. "I'm going to take the monster a new bowl of ice cream; Yue and I kind of, er, surprised her into dropping the last one. I'll tell you the rest of it afterwards..."
Yukito looked over at the spilled bowl of ice cream, and Touya's dropped shirt, and the fact that it had apparently been more than half torn off of him; he picked up a stray button and tossed and caught it lightly. "And he thinks I'm the scandalous one?"
"There were, er, circumstances," Touya said, a little lamely. "Anyway. Emergency ice cream and apology delivery. Be right back." He scooped up his shirt and shoved his arms through the holes, making a halfhearted attempt at approximately straightening it as he headed toward the kitchen, the freezer, and some nice cold water he could shove his hands under and think icy and extremely non-arousing thoughts about for a few minutes.
